From commentor Khead:
Sweet Pea was a stray kitty that roamed our neighborhood for a number of years (3? 4?) after we moved in. When our beloved pet cat Casey at the time started to fade in health (he was 20!) we noticed that Sweet Pea was spending a lot of time near our townhouse. We started feeding her and building a relationship by letting her come into our front door for some time when we did feed her. My wife also bought her a little house where she lived on our front porch/stoop for the winter. When our original kitty could not go up and down the steps any longer we brought Sweet Pea in to live on the lower floor of our townhouse. After Casey passed away in July ’09 Sweet Pea had the run of the house.
__
She has become a spoiled rotten member of our family. Sleeps with us every night. We looked through some pics to send and although we have a bunch of her being spoiled in sleeping spots, we decided on the two we sent instead. The close up of her on the floor shows her stub ear which our vet thinks shows she was feral. The vet thinks someone fixed her, clipped her ear, and then put her back out. I have a hard time believing she was feral given how much love she shows us, but the only other explanation is that the tip of her ear froze while she was living outside.
__
The pic of her in the doorway getting combed was the first time we tried to groom her. She had let us feed and pet her for a bit and we decided to see if she would let us comb her. We have moved on from combing to belly rubs….
Grover Gardner
She’s probably a fixed stray. We have a few of them hanging around our work complex–not all of them are truly “feral” and some of them are quite sweet. There’s a big old black male that loves to be petted and held. I’d gladly take him home but I’m afraid my office mates would complain! He’s got a pretty good life there, with a place to sleep in the warehouse when he wants, and plenty of food.
Sweet Pea is lovely–kudos for taking her in!
stuckinred
Cats with torn ears two days in a row!
JPL
Khead, The first picture should be titled “Who’s the Boss.”
My weekend should be interesting. I have been pet sitting for a cat since June and as soon as my son moves into pet friendly apartment he’ll be gone. Miss Moxie, the 18lb mutt has tolerated the cat or should I say the cat has tolerated Miss Moxie. Anyway the other son is bringing over a Maltese that he purchased for his SO and would like to keep it a surprise until Christmas. Miss Moxie is pretty adaptable, the cat not so much so I purchased my wine and plan on just chilling out with the pets. A friend suggested a case of wine, that way I could use the case to put the Maltese in.
WereBear
She looks so cuddly! I adore her name.
Perhaps a glitch in someone’s feral evaluation process. Or perhaps, it’s your family.
Southern Beale
Wow. Sweet Pea looks JUST like one of our new kittens, Etta! (I’ve got her picture on my home page right now if you want to see). Etta adopted us over the summer … I called her demon spawn for a while but she’s actually sweeter than her sister, who also adopted her.
One of these days I will send you guys some pics and stories of some of our more interesting pack members.
:-)
BDR
She’s a feral. The squared ear is the mark.
A mom feral had three kittens in our shed. We trapped them all with the help of Metro Ferals and had all four spayed or neutered (and all have the squared ear). Mom cat still won’t come near us. The three kittens all let us pet or hold them to varying degrees, and one is now a house cat, incredibly affectionate.
Yay! for Khead and family.
J.
Purrrrrrrrrrrr. Gorgeous kitty. (Sweet Pea and Tunch would make a handsome couple. Just sayin’.)
Pococurante
And already taking on the streamlined silhouette of happy home meatloaf… ;-)
comrade scott's agenda of rage
As said above, it looks like she’s a product of a local TNR program.
Glad she has a forever home and glad you shared!
ChrisS
My brother has a cat that was a feral kitten until he was two or three months old. Currently, he’s the most cuddly cat you could think of.
Cliff
Molly and me went for a early morning freeze .. err hike.. 8 degrees at the house, when we left.
http://mollymaesden.blogspot.com/2010/12/brrrrrr.html
Got some glorious sunrise shots at least =)
celiadexter
I’m with your vet re: her ear. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between a feral and a stray or throwaway– and if a cat is outdoors and un-“owned” it doesn’t really matter for spay/neuter purposes. The eartip is a badge of honor. Quite a regal kitty!
WereBear
We worried Tristan would have feral tendencies; found in a field, no housecats for miles around. But he’s a real cuddle bug.
tesslibrarian
I love the combing picture– Sweet Pea looks so happy and in love!
I’m starting to believe that cats who have spent most of their lives outdoors are the most appreciative of the cuddles and affection and warm, soft spaces for sleeping. Our 10-year-old Jack is currently being transitioned to indoor-only, or as we call it “retired.”
Spring may be a different story, but for now it’s wonderful to watch him become less wary of the world around him, letting us pick him up for a cuddle and rub his belly without freaking out–and even starting to enjoy it. He is starting to talk to us more, and learning to use his inside voice. It’s really wonderful.
Annie
She is a real beauty with attitude…love it!
debit
What a doll. She looks like she could be Oliver’s cousin.
@tesslibrarian:
Agreed. We estimate Rufus had been on his own for at least six months and about a month after we’d brought him in, one of the kids left a door open. Luther and Max went out to explore and were easily captured, but we couldn’t find Rufus anywhere. I was in an absolute panic and went back inside to get a warmer jacket so I could continue to search, and there he was curled up up in a patch of sunshine on my bed. He’s shown no desire to ever go outside again.
CatHairEverywhere
What a sweet, pretty girl!
Admiral_Komack
I’ve been to weeseeyou.com:
http://weeseeyou.com/2010/12/09/w-e-e-peeps-thursday-link-sweep-53/#disqus_thread
SEND BACK THE CLOWNS! Rachel and KO and solons oh my! Can someone please send back the clowns
The daily howler
December 9, 2010
(excerpt)
Tuesday night, (Rachel) Maddow devoted most of her program to the new proposal. Her incoherence and incomprehension were astounding, matched only by her sense of absolute certainty concerning each word which fell from her mouth.
She did catch one misstatement from Obama’s press conference—his apparently inaccurate claim that Republicans had been opposing extension of the child tax credit. But elsewhere, her own incomprehension was general. To wit:
Maddow seems to have no idea what the Alternative Minimum Tax is. Repeatedly, she offered variants of this absurd statement: “Republicans also got President Obama to agree to a fix in the alternative minimum tax.” (The AMT is subject to an annual “fix” which is completely non-controversial.)
Maddow seems to think Republicans tricked Obama into extending the Earned Income Tax Credit—a program which benefits low-income earners.
Maddow engaged in one of her classic truncated quotes followed by sarcastic sneering, doctoring Obama’s perfectly intelligible explanation as to why this particular matter was “a unique circumstance.” Having omitted Obama’s explanation, Maddow looked at the camera and snarked and sneered about his lack of same. (This practice is quite common on this miserable program.)
And then, there was Maddow’s weird interview with economist Simon Johnson—an interview which started like this:
MADDOW (12/7/10): Professor Johnson, thank you very much for joining us tonight.
JOHNSON: Nice to be with you.
MADDOW: Am I right that from what we know about this deal that none of it is offset, this is just $900 billion added to the debt?
JOHNSON: Absolutely. As far as we know, it goes straight into the debt. It expands the deficit. It’s completely irresponsible.
MADDOW: Give us a perspective on how big adding $900 billion to the debt is. Nine billion dollar is obviously a big number. All the debt and deficit number seem sort of equally big from a human distance. How big a deal is this in terms of adding to our debt problem?
JOHNSON: It’s a very big deal.
Very, very odd. All of a sudden, Maddow seemed to be upset by the very idea of any deficit spending. Did the lady understand that this new-found concern seems to represent a change in her long-held position?
All year long, Maddow has targeted those tax cuts for the rich ($700 billion over ten years!), pleasing tribal libs in the process—without saying a single word about the much larger tax cuts for the middle-class, which would have added $3.2 trillion to those very same deficits. Suddenly, Johnson was saying that all such spending is “completely irresponsible”—and Maddow showed no earthly sign of seeing that this would represent a change in her own position. To all appearances, the lady was shocked, shocked to think that Obama would borrow money like that. In fact, Obama had proposed such borrowing all year long—and Maddow, playing tribal cards, had thoroughly seemed to support it.
Does this biggest of all cable frauds ever know what she’s talking about?
Maddow is one of the biggest frauds ever dumped on the public. In this case, she has been dumped on us—the suffering souls of the liberal world. That said, Keith Olbermann has been equally clownish and clueless in his own screeching and yelling this week—and in his own interviews, where he too seemed to pretend that he didn’t hear when guests seemed to disagree with him. (We think of his Tuesday night interviews with both Ezra Klein and Rep. Bobby Scott.) But what do you expect when big corporations select our “progressives” for us?
How upside-down have things gotten this week? Last night, Chris Matthews batted Sherrod Brown all over the lot, calling out the sheer absurdity of his Tuesday performance with Maddow. Double absurdly, Brown is saying that Obama should give a few speeches in Maine, forcing that state’s Republican senator to flip on tax cuts for the rich. This is one of the most ridiculous presentations we’ve ever seen from a major pol. That much said, in a dozen years of watching Hardball, we don’t think we’ve ever seen Matthews clarify an actual issue. Last night, incredibly, he did.
Matthews actually clarified something! But then, things have been so absurd this week, even Gail Collins was spotted making sense in today’s New York Times . ..
Duh. Major Dem solons ducked a vote. Now, they’re pretending that things can somehow be salvaged if Obama would make a few speeches in Maine! How vast has the absurdity gotten? Even Collins and Matthews are suddenly getting things right!
Maddow’s a consummate cable fraud; Olbermann is no better. The corporate boys purchased these presents for us. After Christmas, can we possibly send these clowns back?
More on our side’s intellectual breakdown tomorrow. Truly, the liberal world has been behaving like children in this pre-Christmas week.
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh1…
Rachel Maddow: she’s soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo smart!/snark
khead
The P is a star! Thank you for the post and comments. We sent those pics and story for the calendar – and I’ve been meaning to send in an email to add to the story but haven’t had the time. Will add a post later….
phillygirl
Not all feral kittehs are forever feral. One of my rescues was a totally wild girl who, once I trapped her and took her to the vet because she had an injured leg, became my ward. She lost the leg to amputation and lost a badly infected eye, too. Unable to turn her out to resume her feral life, I kept her in the basement. She hid down there, trembling, for three or four months. Then, one day, she crept upstairs, jumped on the sofa and watched the baseball game with me. You never know what these guys are gonna do. Best to you and Sweet Pea.
Maody
how lovely is that photo of her with her head back getting combed, eyes closed, whiskers forward… beautiful. the ear snip may mean feral, but she isn’t anymore. thanks for sharing your kitteh love.
asiangrrlMN
Sweet Pea is gorgeous! She looks so happy inside.
@J.: You read my mind. First thing I thought of when I saw Sweet Pea–perfect for Tunchie!
spider
I have one cat. and black skins
Thomas Beck
Oh, she’s gorgeous! (And she knows it.)
beabea
Oh how cute. I especially love the picture where the sun is shining on her face while she is being combed. That is one contented kitty.
As others have said, she looks like she got her ear tipped in a feral trap-neuter-release program. Watched the vets once at a feral spay day; they put a clamp across the left ear tip, then cut along the edge of the clamp with the scalpel. They leave the clamp in place briefly to stop any bleeding. All while the cat is under, of course.
As a volunteer for a low-cost spay/neuter program that also does a lot of feral TNR, we encourage anybody who feeds a stray cat more than once, to get that cat fixed. We don’t care if it’s not truly feral; what matters is that it’s an unowned cat living outside, that will make more unowned cats unless the feeder takes action. My guess is that whoever fed Sweet Pea before she joined your family, was just such a person.